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Hovering Over a Touchscreen

Ever since the iPhone came out, we’ve all been obsessed with touch-screen technology. Not that it didn’t exist before then, but it really wasn’t so much in the public eye unless you were using a commercial kiosk or something like that. Now touch-screens are everywhere, but there’s still one thing that the mouse & screen combination can do that the touchscreen never got right: hovering. You can see it in several online applications; the menu that unscrolls when you hover over it, the link that magically appears as the cursor passes over. We could never get it right on touch-screens because it’s basically a binary operation. You’re either touching it, or you’re not.

Folks over at TrueTouch have figured out a way for a screen to actually track how far away your finger is from the screen. So, if it’s close, but not touching, the screen will “see” it, and the operation will register as hovering. I can totally see this becoming the next big thing in mobile technology. Check out the demo video over at the source article from DVICE.